Update 3-1-10: It appears I’m losing about 10 followers a day on average, as the tweeps catch up to the fact that they themselves have been unfollowed. (new chart at bottom of page)

I’ve done it again. Right here, just weeks before the announcement of the Texas Social Media Awards and the start of SXSW I’ve gone an unfollowed over 4k followees on Twitter. I am sure the affect on my followers will be quite dramatic as well. So here’s why I did it.

1. Life is too short to be trying to read everything.
2. Everyone is so stoked about BUZZ because they get to be selective about who they choose to include. (Duh, how’d we get so over-followed in the first place.
3. Discovery is the biggest rush with social media, so if I unfollow a ton of folks I get to rediscover them again! wOOt!
4. I believe who you follow is as important as who follows you.
5. Good Twitter tools are hard to find.
6. All the folks I unfollowed were probably auto-dm bots anyway.
7. I probably do not deserve the number of followers I have. (Well, that one’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but…)
8. Take a bold action. None of this unfollowing by the 20-per-page, as Twitter.com (hell) would have it.

So what is going to happen from here? Oh my, all the people who are concerned about who’s following and who’s not following will start dropping me in huge waves. Thus my ranking, my status on the Twitterholic in Austin list is going to plummet like a rock. And I will drop back into the goop from whence I came.

Then something remarkable is going to happen. I am going to discover some new cool people to follow. Some of whom I have not followed in months. Some of whom I’ve never followed. And some of whom I’ve followed, unfollowed and followed again.

And that’s the fun of it.

Here’s a comparison of my followers vs. followees as reported by twittercounter.com.

All that said, I hope you stick around. I hope you tweet good stuff. And I hope we continue to enjoy the conversation.

But I will understand if you UFM. As a close friend said recently, “I tried to follow you, but you are insane. Half the time I have no idea what you are talking about. It just made me feel confused and dumb.”

I hope that’s not the affect my range of tweets has on you, but I do understand if it does. I do.

I hope you can find a lot of great reasons to follow me, and my rants on Twitter and about Twitter. Here’s my little collection called The Twitter Way.

And I’m also putting together a list of TwitterTools, the one’s I know and love. I call this the TwitterMatrix.

This massively coordinated unfollowing was powered by ManageTwitter.com. Bless them for developing a new tool to manage our accounts at more than 20 peeps per page, like Twitter.com. Now we can get some unfollowing done, by golly!

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Here’s the newest chart as of 3-1-10. I have changed the scale to be only 1 month, to show more clearly the pattern as my followers begin to drop off, primarily because I have unfollowed, not because I am tweeting differently, or doing anything spammy. It’s just a fact, if you unfollow me I’m likely to unfollow you. If I’m paying attention, that is. And if I care.